thinking out loud about latent and reluctant leadership

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Give your vision away

This is the way to create movements. Purpose and cause are far more important than organization and ownership. It’s about walking away from the need to “box out” or defend our territory. If you want to accomplish something more quickly and broadly than you could imagine doing on your own, open source and viral are the methods to pursue.

But release comes at a cost. In someone else’s voice, your message might not be precise. In a chaotic movement, there might be confusion about what organization to come to with questions or for support. Most efforts at branding are limiting rather than empowering. Yet marketers are increasingly willing to do what it takes to make their story “go viral.” For instance: at the end of 2009, when hundreds of filmmakers vied to make their own Doritos commercial for the 2010 Superbowl, then engaged in private marketing campaigns to find voters so that their ad had a chance to air and then a church entered the competition and the national media picked up on “the controversy,” Doritos was the big winner. You can’t buy publicity like that, and it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t found ways to give their message away. They figured out what was sacred and what could be turned loose. The biggest result was an unleashing of creativity.

My suggestion? Build your brand around your ability to build movements. I think Wycliffe is on the verge of being able to do that with Vision 2025, our BHAG that the Word of God is accessible for every language in this generation. Counterintuitively, the likelihood that it will happen increases as the process gets messier, the definitions murkier and the measurements more difficult.